SEPTEMBER 5 (2024)

A 1970s promotional spot for the ABC television network, shown early in Tim Fehlbaum’s new film September 5, briefly brings the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center into view, and inevitably reminds us of modern history’s most notorious terrorist incident. The film’s subject, though, is a much earlier one which, at the time, was equally shocking to the world, and equally mediated through television: the taking hostage and killing of Israeli athletes and their coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics by members of the Palestinian organisation Black September. This was an era when terrorism was becoming wearisomely familiar—the Olympics attack took place just a few months after the killing of 26 people at an airport in Israel, for example—but what happened in Munich was disturbing not only in itself but because of its immensely high-profile setting.

Like the previous films based on the incident (more on which below), it’s more or less factually accurate in recounting events at the Olympic Village. It’s also superbly acted, and perfectly paced—there’s enough filler between the main dramatic twists and turns for the audience to believe they are watching a crisis unfold, rather than just edited highlights, but it never drags for a moment and there is thankfully no departing from the main storyline into sub-plots about families or lovers.

The twin strokes of brilliance that elevate September 5 above many thrillers on similar historical topics, though, are the decisions by writer-director Fehlbaum (directing his fourth feature in 20 years, and likely to step up to bigger things as a result) and his co-writers to take an oblique angle on the story, telling it not from the point of view of any of the principal participants but through the experience of a US TV crew covering the Olympics… and then to confine the action almost entirely to the TV crew’s cramped facilities at the Olympics site.

Imagine United 93 (2006) taking place completely in the air traffic control room, or Apollo 13 (1995) never leaving mission control: keeping us at one remove from the events heightens, rather than reduces, their intensity because we never know when information is going to arrive, or whether it’ll be complete or accurate. Like the ABC TV crew that September 5 follows, we do not have the comfort of omniscience

And we can identify with them. They are peripherally involved in the incident, insofar as they are the ones communicating it to the rest of the world, but they are also viewers of it themselves. September 5 doesn’t make a great deal about the obvious multiple parallels between the TV journalists, the makers of the film, and the film’s audience, but the implications add another layer of interest. Some of the practical ethical problems that the journalists faced—for example, the fact that the hostages’ families could watch their coverage and so could the terrorists—are also touched on, though never sententiously.

The practicalities of broadcasting—both technical and organisational, like the turf war between the sports department (which was on the ground in Munich) and the news department (back in the US, but eager to take over the story)—are explained well. Views from ABC’s multiple cameras add variety to the narrative’s progress, and the potential of equipment like phones, walkie-talkies and even a map is also exploited to the full with September 5’s storytelling. One scene where reels of film are strapped around an ABC worker’s chest—just like a suicide bomber’s kit—so that he can take them to a camera crew without being identified by security is a rare, momentary touch of black humour in a generally sombre film.

Ben Chaplin as Marvin Bader, a senior ABC official, is the strongest of all in an exceptionally strong cast, a completely believable man who is professional to the utmost but—like the rest of the ABC team–also can’t help becoming a little emotionally involved.

Nearly as fine as Chaplin, although her part is smaller, is Leonie Benesch in the role of Marianne Gebhardt, a local translator for the ABC crew who, as well as playing a key part in their coverage, acts as a flashpoint for American doubts about their German hosts. The shadow of Nazism hangs heavily over these “peaceful postwar games”—it was less than 30 years since the end of World War II, and though the Germans are of course keen for them to be seen as representing a new Germany, the taking of Jews as hostages raises obvious and very uncomfortable historical associations.

Arledge asks the American-Jewish swimmer Mark Spitz (David Iselin) “What’s it like to win a gold [medal] in Hitler’s backyard?”. Later, Bader bitterly asks Gebhardt whether her parents, like so many, claim to have known nothing of the Holocaust; she replies that she is not her parents, and both the line and Benesch’s delivery of it are perfect. Here, as elsewhere, September 5 lets us see different points of view without passing judgement on them, though at another point—when a male ABC staffer asks Gebhardt to bring him coffee—its observation on the casual sexism of the period is sharp.

Other sterling performances come from John Magaro as Geoffrey Mason, head of the ABC control room, who captures powerfully the conflicts between journalistic competitiveness and responsibility; Benjamin Walker as reporter Peter Jennings (who later became a well-known ABC anchor and who advises, in an excess of professional caution, against using the word “terrorist”); and Peter Sarsgaard as Roone Arledge, the president of ABC Sports, though his role in the film is not quite as big as you might expect and the writing fails slightly at conveying how high up in the network’s hierarchy he is. (One might imagine he’s at much the same level as Bader and Mason.)

Real footage of the ABC anchor Jim McKay is also used frequently, and very cleverly cut into the fictional footage, to the point that he seems like a fully-fledged character. (“Now back to the real world,” he says at one point when turning from coverage of the Games themselves back to the terrorist incident, and then adds that it actually “seems the unreal one”.) An important contribution is made, too, by the musical score from Lorenz Dangel: mostly ominous though it can be more lyrical, it often blends almost imperceptibly into the soundtrack before emerging full-throated at key moments.

The events of September 1972 have been filmed before. An early version, the made-for-TV 21 Hours at Munich (1976), came out just a few years later and is really only interesting for showing a nearly contemporary view of the story and for having been shot in the actual locations. It’s let down by some truly terrible acting (Franco Nero as the leader of the terrorists and Anthony Quayle as an officer of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, are the exceptions), unconvincing fights and stunts, and the kind of music and production values you’d associate with a cheap TV detective show. It’s also more respectful toward the German police response—in reality, much-criticised—than September 5 is, though fault-finding is not the main concern of the new film either.

Steven Spielberg took the incident as the starting point for his Munich (2005), which received high praise from some critics but a more lukewarm response from others. Relating a much-fictionalised version of a subsequent Mossad operation targeting the organisers of the Munich attack, it is certainly handled with Spielberg’s usual accomplished touch from scene to scene, but it’s over-long and somewhat over-romanticises the Israelis. ABC’s reporting of the incident, as well as that by other journalists, is used extensively early on.

The finest screen telling of the tale until now has been Kevin Macdonald’s One Day in September (1999), a hard-hitting, supremely gripping film which won the ‘Best Documentary’ Academy Award (and also uses some ABC footage).

Now, however, its crown may just have been stolen by September 5, which isn’t only a compelling, edge-of-the-seat treatment of the Munich massacre, but also one of the best recent films about the practice of journalism—easily the equal of Alex Garland’s 2024 Civil War (2024) or Maria Schrader’s She Said (2022), and superior to Ellen Kuras’s rather flat Lee (2023). It’s a sad reminder, too, that not a great deal seems to have changed in the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians in more than half a century.

GERMANY • USA | 2024 | 95 MINUTES | 2.39:1 • 1.33:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • GERMAN • HEBREW

Cast & Crew

director: Tim Fehlbaum.
writers: Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum & Alex David.
starring: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, Zinedine Soualem, Georgina Rich & Corey Johnson.